According to Search Engine Land, Google has a new bid simulator for AdWords users. From what their article shows, it looks pretty interesting.

In essence, it’s a tool to see what would happen as you change your bids. It approximates what happens as you raise and lower your bids.

Very useful if you’re serious about your AdWords advertising. You can figure out which keywords need a change, how much of one and about how much it will change your traffic.

If you know what you can afford to pay this can be a huge help in deciding if raising your bids will be worth it, or if you can drop them and earn more.

If you’re using AdWords, take some time and play with this toy. It’s on my list now. I’d love to see where I can get better results on my campaigns.

Getting a lot of traffic to a website is a wonderful thing. Trouble is, it’s not a guaranteed thing. Even when you have good traffic it can vanish away, especially when it comes at the whim of the search engines.

Free traffic in general can be hard to come by. It’s not really free, you see. If it’s not costing you money, it probably cost you a ton of time. Either that or you found a wonderfully rare niche to exploit.

Good traffic to a website isn’t a right. It’s a combination made primarily from hard work and persistence.

What if your site isn’t getting much traffic?

If you’ve had a site for a while and it’s still not getting much traffic, take a look at what you’re doing with it.

Have you published any articles for it on the big article marketing websites?

Have you tried guest posting on relevant blogs?

Do you have solid pay per click campaigns?

Does your site or server crash a lot?

Is your site friendly to search engine spiders?

There are a lot more questions you can ask if your site’s traffic just isn’t increasing. Just sitting there and saying “I have great content, so where’s my traffic?” isn’t going to solve anything.

Odds are, you’re one of thousands of sites on the same or similar topics. If you don’t stand out, not only to your visitors but to the search engines, you’re not going to do all that well.

Are there any quick solutions?

That depends in part on what you mean by quick. If you have a good Twitter following, for example, tweeting out links to some of your best stuff can bring traffic… provided it’s relevant to your following.

Building a real following takes time, and is something you should work on long in advance. Don’t bother with programs promising you thousands of followers; you want people who really read what you tweet, not just bots or other people trying to increase their numbers blindly.

Other social media can do well, although in many cases you’re better off letting it be discovered naturally by other users. Most sites strongly frown upon frequent submission of your own material.

You can of course increase your bids and tweak your pay per click ads. The risk here is that you may lose a lot of money, but if you keep in mind your conversion rates you should know what you can get away with.

Being written up on a bigger website can also bring a nice tidal wave of traffic. I got that one recently on another of my sites, and it was quite the experience. I really wasn’t all that prepared for it, but next time I will know a lot more about how to handle that kind of thing. It was pretty amazing.

But that one did take time. The interview was months before the article. Very, very much worth it, though.

The most important thing is to just not give up on it all. Keep working on building your traffic and getting it from more than just one source. The more sources you have for traffic, the less likely it is that all of it will vanish.